I've been keeping ants for a while now, and it never stops amazing me how fascinating such a small colony is. The great thing is that you get to see natural behavior up close: the queen, the workers and the division of labor in a complete mini-ecosystem. And honestly, getting started is really not that hard if you get a few basics right.
What you need is simple: a formicarium (the nest), food with both sugars and proteins, a constant water source, and the right temperature and humidity. For beginners I recommend hardy, easy species such as the black garden ant (Lasius niger), the seed-eating Messor barbarus or the larger Camponotus nicobarensis.
The biggest mistakes I (and others) made: overfeeding so that things go moldy, too little moisture in the setup, and disturbing the colony too often. Ants like peace and quiet — observe briefly each day, but leave the nest alone as much as possible and don't place it in direct sunlight or near vibrations.
My tip is to take a quick look every day, keep the outworld clean with tweezers and only use good food to prevent mites and mold. Note down temperature and behavior, and you'll really get to know your colony.
It's more than a hobby: it's a window into nature. A single queen can grow into thousands of workers, and following that process is incredibly educational and relaxing.
Source: Quality Ants
When we build a formicarium, we usually think about chambers, tunnels and humidity. I did not know that animals actively use nest architecture to protect themselves against disease. A study from the University of Bristol shows exactly that.
The team led by Luke Leckie let two colonies of 180 workers each dig in a container filled with soil. After 24 hours, 20 more ants were added to each colony. In one group, the added ants carried infectious fungal spores and posed a risk of infection. The ants then kept digging for six days, and regular micro-CT scans made the underground structures visible.
The threatened colony dug faster and more intensively than the control group. Its nest became more complex and less directly connected, and its entrances were spaced further apart. Storage and brood chambers were more isolated and had fewer connections to other chambers. The researchers suspect the ants reduce contact this way and protect their sensitive offspring.
Simulations using 3D models of the nests confirmed that this design really does lower the risk of infection. The effect was even stronger when you account for the fact that infected ants tend to separate themselves from the rest of the colony anyway.
According to Leckie, it is new that a non-human animal reshapes its environment to reduce the spread of disease. The team sees this as an inspiration for urban planning and the design of social spaces. To me, it mostly shows how much behavior is hidden in a nest that we only glimpse in a formicarium. The study was published in Science in 2025.
Source: scinexx
If you have ever watched a colony grow from a queen and a handful of workers into hundreds of ants, you might wonder how much each worker costs the colony. A study in Science Advances puts a number on one part of that cost: the cuticle, the protective outer layer of the body.
Arthur Matte, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge who began the work at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and Evan Economo, now at the University of Maryland, measured cuticle and body volume in more than 500 ant species using a large set of 3D X-ray scans. Colony sizes in the dataset run from tens of individuals to millions.
The cuticle is nutritionally expensive because it needs nitrogen and minerals. Across species, cuticle investment ranged from about 6 percent to 35 percent of body volume. Species that put less into the cuticle tended to have larger colonies, and lower investment was also linked to higher diversification rates, a rough measure of evolutionary success.
The authors' interpretation is that collective defence, disease control, foraging and division of labour reduced the need for heavy individual armour. That may have created a feedback loop in which thinner cuticles made larger colonies possible. They also suggest that lower nitrogen needs may have helped ants settle nutrient-poor habitats, though why this drives speciation is still unknown.
I like that the study frames cheap, replaceable workers as a strength of the colony. Termites might have followed a similar path, but the authors note that this remains untested.
Source: Phys.org (University of Maryland)
Disease in a crowded colony is a real risk, and ants have more than one way of dealing with it. A study in Nature Communications describes one of the strangest I have come across: sick pupae that signal their own death.
The work focuses on Lasius neglectus, a small black garden ant, and comes from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Erika Dawson is named as lead author in the coverage, and the publication lists Sylvia Cremer. The paper is titled Altruistic disease signalling in ant colonies.
Sick worker pupae give off a chemical that prompts adult workers to destroy them. The workers remove the cocoon, bite holes in the pupa and insert poison, which acts as a disinfectant that kills both the pathogen and the pupa. In the experiments, the team extracted the odour from sick pupae and applied it to healthy brood, and the workers still destroyed the healthy pupae. A further test showed that sick pupae release the odour only when workers are nearby.
Infected queen pupae do not send the signal. The researchers suggest this may be because queens have stronger immune systems and can fight off the infection.
It is a grim strategy, but it makes sense when the colony, not the individual, is what counts. I found it a good example of why brood care in an ant nest is more complicated than simply feeding and warming the larvae.
Source: Phys.org (AFP)
Anyone who keeps ants knows the basic pattern: one queen, many workers, and a few males during swarming season. That is why a report from Japan surprised me. It describes a species that breaks this pattern completely.
The species is Temnothorax kinomurai. In this rare ant, only queens develop. There are no males and no workers. Young queens invade the nests of the related species Temnothorax makora, kill the resident queen and some of the workers with their stingers, and then have the surviving workers raise their offspring.
It was already known that this species lives as a parasite. What was unclear was whether its offspring really consisted only of queens. Keiko Hamaguchi of the Kansai Research Center and her team collected six colonies, including eggs and larvae, and raised them in the laboratory. Once all the young had matured, they determined caste and sex, and the result was clear: only queens were produced.
This is possible through parthenogenesis, meaning the queens develop from unfertilized eggs. Males are simply not needed. According to the researchers, the combination of parasitism without any workers of its own and parthenogenetic reproduction is unique among ants so far. Other parasites lack either workers or males, but never both.
Senior author Jürgen Heinze of the University of Regensburg calls the strategy unexpected but evolutionarily sensible: the species puts all its resources into new young queens. I find it striking how a discovery like this puts the image of the 'typical' colony into perspective, the image our hobby is built on. The study was published in Current Biology in 2026.
Source: scinexx
Few ant news stories have made me reread the headline twice, but this one did: the queens of one species can produce males of a different species. It was published in Nature by a team led by Jonathan Romiguier of the University of Montpellier.
The protagonist is Messor ibericus, a harvester ant from southern Europe. The researchers excavated more than 50 nests and identified 132 males across 26 colonies. Some were hairy, like M. ibericus, and others were hairless, like Messor structor. Genetic tests showed that all of them had the same mother: an M. ibericus queen.
The mechanism is astonishing. The queen stores M. structor sperm in her spermatheca and uses it to clone males of that species, removing the egg's own genetic material so that only the sperm's DNA is expressed. The authors call this xenoparity. The cloned males also inherit their mother's mitochondrial DNA.
Why does it happen? Because workers only develop from the genetic combination of both species. If the queen mated only with males of her own species, her daughters would be queens with no workers to look after the colony. According to Romiguier, the two species can no longer live apart, and they split more than five million years ago.
The strategy lets colonies expand into areas where M. structor does not live, such as Sicily, but without genetic recombination the cloned males accumulate harmful mutations, which could eventually make the system collapse. It is a great reminder that the biology of queens and colonies is far stranger than introductory guides suggest.
Source: Muy Interesante
We tend to think ants either cooperate inside the nest or fight their neighbors. A new study shows a third option: interspecies cleaning, which until now had been described only in marine cleaner fish. It is the first time such an observation has been made on land.
The entomologist Mark Moffett, of the National Museum of Natural History in the United States, was working at a research station in the Arizona desert. He saw large harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex barbatus, approach the nests of small ants of the genus Dorymyrmex, take up a special posture and let them clean their open jaws. The results were published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
The numbers are impressive. The camera recorded more than 90 cleaning sessions over several days, each lasting from 15 seconds to five minutes, with one to five small ants climbing onto a single harvester. In a control experiment, the researchers offered a dead, frozen harvester: they inspected it but did not clean it, so the idea that they were eating corpses can be ruled out.
What each side gains is not yet clear. Perhaps the small ants lick nutritious lipids from the harvesters, and the harvesters gain antibacterial protection, since some Dorymyrmex secrete antifungal substances. There is also a hypothesis that the small ants pass calming pheromones to aggressive neighbors, which helps them live safely alongside them.
For anyone who keeps ants, this is a good reminder of how little we know about the everyday lives of these insects. What I liked most personally is that the conclusion rests on simple observations and careful controls.
Source: Naked Science
One ant story stuck with me in particular. In 2013, a team from the Polish Academy of Sciences went into a former Soviet nuclear weapons depot at Templewo, in Poland. They were there to survey bats, but they found an ant colony instead.
Nearly a million worker wood ants (Formica polyctena) lived there, among several million corpses. There was no queen, no males, no eggs and no larvae. The nest sat above the bunker on a vertical ventilation shaft. Rusted and worn, it had turned into a trapdoor, and workers kept falling through without any way back up.
The temperature never rose above 10 °C, and no food came in from outside. Mandible marks on the abdomens showed that the workers fed on their dead nestmates, and the new recruits that fell in each year kept the population going.
In 2016, the researchers installed a wooden walkway. Within a few months, almost all of the trapped ants had climbed back up and rejoined their original colony, with no aggression at all.
For anyone who keeps ants, it is a fascinating reminder that a colony without a queen can survive for years if it receives a steady supply from outside. I found this case both grim and very instructive.
Source: Sciencepost
Ants often surprise us, but this news is about chemistry rather than behavior. Sericomyrmex amabilis, a relative of leaf-cutter ants from Central and South America, releases part of its carbon dioxide from the nest through its ventilation and turns another part into a mineral layer on its exoskeleton.
Something similar has been seen before. In 2020, Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues described a biomineral armor in Acromyrmex echinatior and linked it to bacteria of the genus Pseudonocardia. This new work reports that no symbiotic bacteria have yet been found in Sericomyrmex amabilis. If that is confirmed, the species would be the first known animal to turn gas into mineral without the help of bacteria.
The researchers used carbon stable isotope tracing, nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry and carbon-13 solid-state NMR. They found that the layer contains dolomite, a mineral that is hard to produce in the laboratory. To synthesize well-ordered dolomite usually requires pressures and temperatures in the range of hundreds of degrees, and in nature it forms over thousands to millions of years.
The ants, by contrast, create partially ordered dolomite quickly and at low temperatures. The mechanism is still unknown. This biomineralization solves two problems at once: it strengthens the armor and removes excess CO₂ from the nest.
An important caveat: the work has been posted on the bioRxiv preprint server and has not yet undergone peer review, so the results are preliminary. That makes it all the more interesting to follow what comes next.
Source: Naked Science
When you start in myrmecoculture, the first thing you learn is how important the queen is: without her, the colony has no future. That is why a Japanese study describing how a parasitic queen gets worker ants to kill their own mother caught my attention so much.
The research, from the Institute of Biological Sciences at Kyushu University, documents for the first time how two parasitic species, Lasius orientalis and Lasius umbratus, take control of someone else's colony. The work, by Takasuka and colleagues, was published in Current Biology in 2025.
The process has several steps. First, the parasitic queen enters the colony of a related species, such as Lasius flavus or Lasius japonicus, and hides among the workers. Then she approaches the resident queen and sprays her with a fluid from her abdomen, probably formic acid, although that has not yet been confirmed chemically. The fluid does not kill her right away, but it changes her scent.
And here is the key: in these societies, scent identifies each member. The workers stop recognizing their queen, treat her as an intruder and kill her. Afterwards they accept the parasite without resistance and raise her offspring as if they were their own.
The story began with an amateur naturalist, Taku Shimada, who filmed the infiltration and the matricide in Lasius orientalis. The entomologist Keizo Takasuka saw an opportunity in that video and, together with him, designed a controlled experiment that confirmed the phenomenon. According to the paper, the tactic evolved independently in at least two species, so this manipulation of chemical signals may be more common than we thought.
Source: Muy Interesante
Ant colonies run on smell. Nestmates recognise each other by a chemical signature, and anything that smells wrong is treated as an intruder. A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology asks what happens when air pollution changes that smell.
The researchers, led by Nan-Ji Jiang and Bill Hansson with Markus Knaden, exposed six ant species to 100 parts per billion of ozone for 20 minutes, a level often measured in affected areas in summer, and then returned the ants to their colonies. Five of the six species attacked or threatened the ozone-exposed nestmates. The exception was the clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, which showed no aggression, perhaps because it reproduces clonally and has no queen.
The mechanism is neat. Ants carry small amounts of alkenes in their colony odour, and ozone breaks the carbon-carbon double bonds in those molecules. Alkanes, which make up most of the signature, are not affected. Gas chromatography on individual ants confirmed the shift in the alkenes.
There were longer-term effects too. In ozone-polluted colonies of O. biroi, adults stayed farther from their larvae and many larvae died. Since ozone was largely ruled out as a direct cause, the authors suspect that chemical communication between adults and larvae had been disrupted.
What I take from this is how fragile the invisible side of colony life is. The paper, published in PNAS in 2026, suggests other social insects such as bees could be affected as well. It is also a quiet reminder to anyone keeping a colony indoors to think about air quality around the nest.
Source: Phys.org (Max Planck Society)
